This winter, Carleton and St. Olaf jointly received a $25,000 grant to work with local schools and community partners to promote good nutrition and healthy eating. The grant, which comes from the Corporation for National and Community Service and the National Science Foundation’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) program, has sparked a variety of interconnected projects coming out of the ACE office.
Overall, the STEM grant will help faculty and students on both campuses develop and implement curriculum that promotes healthy eating, and educates about plant biology, plant growth, and Northfield-area farms and agriculture. Faculty will help students share their academic knowledge with K-12 students, who can then make more active and informed choices about what they eat and why. Already, Carleton is connecting its classes to the grant. Three professors are now offering courses this spring term with related academic civic engagement components: professors Debby Walser-Kuntz and Susan Singer in the biology department, and professor Katie St. Clair in math. Prof. Walser-Kuntz’s class, Microbiology, is set to examine the microbiotic connection between diet and obesity. The class’s findings will be used by HealthFinders, a local free clinic, to educate patients about the health consequences of their nutrition choices. This partnership is supporting HealthFinders’ new Pura Vida program, which emphasizes exercise and nutrition through educational classes, group activities, and personal logs.
Plant Biology, Prof. Singer’s course, explores how plants adapt to different environments, experimental studies of plants, and the biology underlying current food and agriculture debates. For its academic civic engagement component, students will work with local schools that have overhauled their school lunch programs to create trading cards and games that teach kids about nutrition.
Prof. St. Clair’s Topics in Probability and Statistics class will evaluate the Plant Biology class’s nutrition education project as they study designs for statistical sampling beyond the basic simple random sample. The students will use what they learn about weighting samples in a survey and graphing complex survey data, in order to interpret surveys taken of students in the schools with new lunch and nutritional programs.
In addition to these three courses, some students are creating independent projects related to the STEM grant. Rachel Zucker, a senior psychology major, wrote her senior thesis on what makes messages in exercise education campaigns effective. Now, she is reviewing the scholarship on the nutrition education campaigns, to help support Carleton faculty and local K-12 educators as they develop nutrition curricula.
“What’s so great about this grant is that it uses resources already in Northfield to address a real problem,” Zucker says. “Increasing nutrition and health awareness in at-risk schools is a vital need, and Carleton students in STEM classes have a great chance to move out of classroom settings and use their knowledge in meaningful ways.” In the coming academic year, expect even more classes and student projects to use the STEM funding to develop their academic interests and to improve nutrition education in Northfield.